This or Something Better

Word of Adam West’s death came pinging to my cell phone in the form of Breaking News from the Seattle Times Saturday morning, which seemed odd compared to other breaking news of my week: the House vote to repeal Dodd-Frank bank and lending safeguards, former FBI Director Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the daily texts, calls, and emails from my husband reporting on his hospitalized mother who, plagued with congestive heart failure and a severe infection, has skirted back from the brink of death once again.

I wondered if somehow the Seattle Times knew about my childhood infatuation with Adam West. I was barely in elementary school when Batman ran on network television from 1966-68, and as he zipped around in the Batmobile making Gotham safe from the likes of The Joker, The Riddler, and Catwoman, my father drove a patrol car through South Central Los Angeles through the night.

My father was a deputy with a badge and gun, tall, strong, and even more handsome than Batman; but it was Adam West, the man behind the mask, who I wanted to rescue me.

He might still be wearing his Batman costume, or might just be dressed like Bruce Wayne—either way he’d slow at the sight of my pink stucco house with its bougainvillea covered roof, and see me there, a skinny seven-year-old with swimming-pool-bleached hair, cinnamon candy in my mouth, and wave. At his signal, I would leap from the porch, hop into his convertible, and we’d be off down Pacific Coast Highway headed for the Batcave.

My fantasy never went so far as marriage to Adam West, Bruce Wayne, or Batman, and I never dreamed of booting Robin to become a sidekick. It was enough simply to speed away from home.

Though there were a dozen kids in my neighborhood and we invented nearly as many group games, I performed my Adam West ritual solo. No one but me seemed interested in being saved.

At six my life was calm and happy. The bougainvillea that damaged our roof and wept through our ceiling with each rain had yet to be chopped down to an ugly stump. My father had yet to leave our family. And I had yet to become a latchkey kid left alone too many nights, afraid and bickering with my little sister.

Not my house, but you get the picture.

​But maybe trouble was already lurking and maybe I was going to need help when it finally came into view. I hadn’t been to church enough to know there was a well-known savior I could call on, so I turned to pop culture. I could’ve wished for Batman himself, or even Bruce Wayne, who could drive into the Batcave a rich do-gooder and come out a superhero.

Instead, I wished for an actor in a company car.

​My grappling hooks have never been flung around anything larger than emotional crises (often of my own making), and my archenemies, once I’ve unmasked them, have never been more dangerous than my own fears and doubts, so it seems to me now, fifty years later, that maybe I was onto something, waiting for an actor to cruise by.

For all his fame, Adam West was an ordinary and flawed man, a man who in 1966, I would learn from Wikipedia, was between a short-lived second marriage and a third that would last the rest of his life, just like my father, who rose to the top rank in law enforcement before retiring, and has been married now for 40 years. He and my stepmother have battled half-a-dozen cancers between them, each episode diminishing their bodies but strengthening their love and commitment.

My stepmother, my husband, me, and my father at my wedding reception.

​“Beloved father, husband, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the West family wrote without mention of Mr. West’s Batman role in their announcement of his death. “There are no words to describe how much we’ll miss him…. Hug your loved ones today.”

My husband, a former high-tech exec, has kept vigil in his mother’s hospital room for over a week now, holding her hand, easing her panic when breath eludes, checking on her throughout the night, prodding the doctors and nurses for better care until her recovery, for now, seems assured.

Another riddle solved, another crisis averted.

My husband and his mother on our wedding day.

​I haven’t always valued doing and fixing, especially when it felt as though my feelings were trampled in the process. But I’ve come to understand the necessity of these gifts of action, and their place alongside—rather than instead of—the gifts of contemplation.

And as Father’s Day approaches, I embrace those energetic get-it-done gifts, and their givers:

Adam West, my father, my husband.

Each of these men has taught me something about choosing fluidity over static identity in the course of a lifetime, about how the essential self exists apart from circumstances, career, or accomplishments. They’ve demonstrated doing what you love even in anonymity, remembering, but not longing for the days when the spotlight shone bright upon them. They’ve shown me the rightness of fighting for another’s dignity, even more than for your own desires, and about keeping your sense of humor when life turns out differently from the script you thought you were supposed to follow.

So let us love and laugh, learn and grow, fail and succeed together. When we're in trouble, let's come to our own rescue when we can, and accept help from others when we can't, becoming, either way, real-life heroes in our own small stories.

My prayer partner and I have been praying together for over 20 years. We've prayed in Sunday school classrooms, churches, on our couches, while walking on trails, seated on park benches, over the phone. Almost always our prayers have been in the daylight (or early evening), our prayer time a pause in the steady stream of our days, our to-dos, a welcome interruption from routine, the opportunity to recenter and reframe the rest of our waking hours.

Saturday night I had the rare opportunity to spend the night at my prayer partner's home and the equally rare gift to close the end of a long day in prayer together, seated on her couch, holding hands, the only sound in her house the ticking of the clock.

There is something about praying in community (where two or more are gathered), about joining in intention with another that for me deepens and strengthens the connection to spirit, to the realm that seems to exist just beyond our grasp and comprehension, but is sensed. And in that sensing, there comes a surrender of ego, an ease in letting go of thinking, and floating into simply being.

What a gift it was to end the day in blessed rest. So often, when I end the day and lay my head on my pillow, rest and sleep elude me. I'm flooded with thoughts: reviewing the day, forming a list of what I must do the next day. Rarely do I take the time to surrender all that thinking before I attempt to sleep.

But last night with my prayer partner, I was emptied of worry, and filled with gratitude, as well as this poem:

Last night I had the privilege of participating in the final reading of this year's Ars Poetica . As I mentioned in my post last month, poets submit to a jury that selects poems for presentation to local artists who choose one or more poems to interpret in their chosen media. The art and poems are displayed at various locations, culminating in author-artist events.​"What If People Dropped Like Leaves" came to me last fall as I was raking up after this beautiful Japanese maple in my yard.

What if people dropped like leaves

What if people dropped like leavesour last months and days a dazzling displaybrilliant reds, yellows, oranges flamingbodies, a glorious glowthat draws others from miles aroundto gaze in amazement eyes wide in wonder--remembering how we began so plainyoung, green, ordinary, unremarkableand near our end—blazing beautystunning shimmering shadows in the sun’slow arc across autumn skies

This should be how one dies--a grand metamorphosiswaving brilliantuntil with one simple movewe let go of everythingthat binds usand leaf-thin float freein silent descent, graceful and spentreleased from achievementsand attachments, family trees and branchesuntil we come to rest at lastin the loam of the gloaming

---I was privileged to have Michelle Van Berkom choose to interpret my poem. I haven't met Michelle in person, but the artist statement from her website certainly struck a chord with me:

I have painted all of my life. When I walk into my studio, an altered state of consciousness falls over me like a mantle. I have worked in many different media, but over the years watercolor has become primary.

The unpredictable nature of the controlled accident, the required immediacy and freshness, the challenge of having to get it right the first time, make watercolor my ideal medium. I feel as if the paint itself has a personality with which I work in harmony. There is resistance, there is a very distinct nature that must be understood and respected. Everything is not under my control, but by being sensitive to the nature of the paint, controlled accidents can become invited miracles.

Water is an archetypal symbol for consciousness, emotion, and for spirituality. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to watercolor as a medium, why I find it to be a pathway into my own soul.

I believe that our souls can meet and communicate through art, and so I feel that a part of me speaks through my art on a spiritual level.

This is Michelle's lovely watercolor also titled "What If People Dropped Like Leaves":​

Here's what Michelle says about creating her painting:

I have always loved autumn leaves and collect them each fall and often do "portraits" of them. I am fascinated by their beauty and variety, and the underlying symbolism of death and regeneration. For me, this poem captured everything they meant to me. I regretted that the opportunity came in the spring when there were no fresh specimens, but I did have some photos. The imagery of the poem is intense and moving. I spent a lot of time pondering how to portray the message. I wanted to fit in the idea of moving from this plane into another, and the descriptions of metamorphosis and letting go...but set it in a scene that is at once ordinary and mystical. So I pushed the colors a bit beyond reality, and left the people blank, as if they are holes in the fabric of space and time, or shadows left behind...

"A scene that is at once ordinary and mystical"—life is filled with opportunities to perceive the ordinary and extraordinary, and I'm so grateful to have had this opportunity to share in the creative expression of those moments with others.